Shakespeare Made Easy

So the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is going to make Shakespeare more palatable to all of us. Shakespeare is not easy for some, but a lot of that has to do with how it’s done.

Having done my share of Shakespeare as an actor, I think that it is mainly important that the cast and the director work hard to make the play understandable to themselves, making it less hard for the audience, as the playwright didn’t write these things to be read but to be put into action.

Some words and phrases take many readings to figure out and make clear to an audience, but my fear is that whoever sees these plays will miss what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare.

A large part of the joy in these plays is the language and the mystery of the language. Do we really have to fix it?

That said, the people working on this are not trying to “dumb it down” and have great respect for the plays as written. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.